Art: Religious Works By Michael Tracy

By MICHAEL BRENSON

Published: November 6, 1987

''MICHAEL TRACY: Terminal Privileges,'' currently at P. S. 1, and ''John McCracken: Heroic Stance.'' in the same galleries last year, are complementary shows. In both, the curator Edward Leffingwell has focused attention on an artist outside New York whose career defines a forceful and fertile response to Abstract Expressionism. Mr. McCracken's planks have something of the purity of the paintings of Barnett Newman, but they are cooler and less metaphysical, and his sculptural surface or skin is seamless and impenetrable.

The work of Mr. Tracy, on the other hand, which is being presented in depth in New York for the first time, is tremendously physical. Working in the Southwest that was so important to Jackson Pollock, this 44-year-old artist is determined to violate the pictorial and sculptural skin and release every feeling that may have been sealed or pent up inside it. The surfaces of his devotional paintings and sculptures - as small as reliquaries or as big as walls - may be torn, stabbed or cut. His need to make art that can embrace absolutely everything, from autobiography to superpower politics, has led to paintings, photographs and drawings dripping with blood and hair.

At the entrance to the exhibition is ''Icon of Despair,'' the first work Mr. Tracy made outdoors in San Ygnacio, Tex., on the United States-Mexican border, where he has lived since 1978. A canvas mounted like an altarpiece is penetrated with spikes. The spikes are not only hammered into the front but also the back. And a cluster of them nestled behind the canvas seem to have festered to the point that a flap has peeled or been ripped off like dead skin.

The same gallery includes the more contemplative ''Stations of the Cross: To Latin America.'' They are vaguely suggestive of the monochromatic paintings of Milton Resnick, where a minimum of incident must carry a maximum of meaning. But even the quiet side of Mr. Tracy's work has a dismembered, dug-up, sacrificial quality. In the catalogue, Thomas McEvilley describes these works, split and lumpy with faults and swells, as ''tormented fields.'' It is as if the artist painted the Latin American earth on the verge of disgorging the human misery it has been forced to swallow.

There is almost nothing in this show that does not reflect his strict Roman Catholic upbringing. Mr. Tracy is passionate about Italian religious art, from Duccio to Caravaggio. He has continued to struggle with an issue that was central to the formation and development of abstract art. In an age in which the credibility and authority of organized religion has been increasingly challenged, how can the genuine religious impulse that has been dressed up in religious dogma be rescued and preserved?

Stripped of dogma, Mr. Tracy enters a realm in which big, conflicting feelings are not easily sorted out and tamed. Indeed, his work rejects clear distinctions between spirit and flesh, pleasure and pain, tenderness and violence. In his ''Caravaggio Notations,'' 14 photographs, covered by blood and paint and mounted on Mexican board, present a narrative of two naked men, their heads in stockings like criminals or victims, wrestling with each other in such a way that it is hard to tell where love and hate, bondage and release, begin and end.

Mr. Tracy's will to throw everything into the arena of his art -shared to some degree with other artists who came of age in the 60's - is partly responsible for its driving, obsessive power. But he also has a gift for gesture, a sense of scale and a rare feeling for materials. His commitment is total. With all the excess and sex, there is nothing campy or cynical, as there can be in the work of an artist inspired by him, Julian Schnabel. Mr. Tracy has been strengthened by living on the United States-Mexico border, which has encouraged him to define many of the polarities inside him, including an identification with oppressor and oppressed, in social and political terms.

Some of the most convincing works in this thoroughly convincing show are large crosses, each with carrying rods so that they can be used in actual religious processions. The 1982-87 ''Cruz: La Pasion'' is about 10 feet tall. The cross has serrated edges, like a saw. Hanging from it like dozens of streamers, so thickly clumped that they suggest the fabric of a dress, are small shrines and cheap devotional images. One side of the cross is penetrated with horns, emblems of another arena of sacrifice, triumph and death. The weight of desire that this cross - and Mr. Tracy's art - must support is immense.

The works of Michael Tracy remain at P.S. 1, 46-01 21st Street, Long Island City, Queens, through Dec. 20. The exhibition will travel to Syracuse, Seattle, Los Angeles, Houston, Columbus, Ohio, and perhaps Mexico City. The show was financed in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Tobi Kahn Althea Viafora Gallery 568 Broadway (at Prince Street) Through tomorrow

The new paintings of Tobi Kahn are less easy to like than works he has done before, and that may not be bad. He is moving away from the figure-ground relationship that defined his earlier work and made each chunk of earth, sky and water fit together like a puzzle. Now parts of the landscape jut out, separate themselves from areas adjacent to them and threaten to become independent. In the handful of sculptures, forms inspired by the paintings are either freestanding or inside tiny shrines.

Mr. Kahn's new landscapes also have a more obvious relationship to the human figure, and as a result, a more obvious relationship to Surrealism. Cliffs and islands seem to square off, nestle together and pull apart, suggesting the emotional ebb and flow between two people. Parts of the landscape resemble shoulders, legs and necks. In ''Gulg II,'' the red shoreline and island and the blue water suggest a face almost as lurid and unnatural as a face by Ed Paschke.

There is a hipness here that contrasts sharply with the American modernist slowness that remains one of Mr. Kahn's strengths. Earth, water and sky are often heavy, sometimes brooding, but with a light that transforms them, creating a sense that something is happening. In ''Havar,'' the land seems at first just to sit on water, but then it begins to stretch and stretch along the horizon, and the canvas seems to be stretching with it. How the struggle evolves between predictability and surprise, slowness and speed, landscape and the human figure, will define the next stages of Mr. Kahn's career.